Mary was born in Newport, Arkansas and spent most of her
life in Little Rock, Arkansas. The first thing people notice about her is her
strange name, the "g" is pronounced like a "j". She says, "Its a
Dutch name that goes as far back as any of the family remembers-about three or
four generations in Arkansas." A big change for her came when she was 13
and left her state for the first time on a school trip to Washington DC. The
spirit and energy of the big city made he realize she wanted to leave her small
town. Of her teenage years she says, "I was one of those girls whose
parents hated all her boyfriends. I was attracted to Arkansas hippies, and
wasn't exactly a non-freak myself."
At age 19, in 1972, she left Arkansas by train one day at 4AM
for New York to study
acting. She had no experience and hadn't even met an actor in he life. She
didn't know anyone and stayed at the East End Hotel for Women on 79th
street. Her first acting work was at the New York Neighborhood Playhouse.
The direct or the playhouse, Sanford Meisner, liked her and hired
her for a second season. She left soon after and with several
other alumni from the Playhouse, formed an improvisational group
called Cracked Tokens. They had
no theater and performed at halfway houses.
The legend of how she got started was a chance meeting with Jack Nicholson in a restaurant where
she was working as a waitress at The Magic Pan, a crepe restaurant, won her the chance to go out to Hollywood for a
screen test. Though she explains differently about going to a casting call
on 5/7/77, "I decided I was going to sit in
that stinking room until somebody saw me." This was her motion picture debut opposite the actor (and director)
in Goin' South. Co-starring in the film was Christopher Lloyd, who spoke one of
the first lines ever uttered on screen to Steenburgen. "Chris played a
character named Towfield. In the film, when I spurn his advances and save Jack,
who is a criminal about to be hung, Towfield says 'I've asked you out a thousand
times, and all I got was the flap of your umbrella'." Jack also educated
her not only on the secrets of acting, but of the great actors like Tracey and
Hepburn whom she was unfamiliar with. Even though the film
was a commercial disaster, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in 1978 for
her role. Unfortunately she would have to go back to being a waitress until the next role came
along. She wanted to wait for a role she believed in. Nine months later it
finally came.
That role was Amy in Time After
Time, where set met, fell in
love and eventually married Malcolm. The only problem was that he was already
married at the time. Mary wouldn't be swayed though and was prepared to fight
for him, and she won. In 1981 she said of Malcolm, "Compatible is a terrible, boring word, but if anyone's compatible, it's
that man." Of the role she later said, "Actually, I've played the same scene in that
film and in Back to the Future Part III," she reveals. "I've had a man
from a different time period tell me that he's in love with me, but he has to go
back to his own time. My response in both cases is, of course, disbelief, and I
order them out of my life. Afterwards, I find out I was wrong and that, in fact,
the man is indeed from another time, and I go after him (them) to profess my
love. It's a pretty strange feeling to find yourself doing the same scene, so
many years apart, for the second time in your career."
The role of Amy made her a home town hero. Ex-president Bill Clinton was
running for governor and was speaking
before a group of retired railroad workers, and he was talking to them about a
sort of mentoring program of senior citizens with the youth. He mentioned the potential in
the community for people, and he had just heard about
this young woman who came from a real working class family in Arkansas who had
been discovered by Jack Nicholson and cast in a film. He's telling the story
and the importance of being there for the young people, and he hears this
sobbing in the audience. He keeps talking and realizes there's this real weeping
going on, and he's thinking what a great job he's doing talking. After he
finished his speech, he went down into the audience and went up to this man
who's wiping tears from his eyes, and he said, "I see that my remarks have
touched you and I wanted to meet you. My name is Bill Clinton." And he
said, "Well, my name's Morris Steenburgen and if you're going to talk about
my daughter, I think you ought to meet her!" Since then they have become
lifelong friends. The Clintons used to stay with Malcolm and Mary in London and
they were also at her and Ted's wedding. Mary said it was the best present
because he brought the secret service with them and it kept photographers out.
In 1980 she won Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
with her portrayal of Lynda Dummar in Melvin and Howard which was also
her first nude scene. She was really nervous about it, but Malcolm was an expert
and encourage her, "You liked the script when your read it, now just do
it." She was pregnant on the set and soon after she gave
birth to their first daughter. After Melvin she was directed by Milos Foreman in Ragtime.
The director called her "remarkable" and she again won critical
praise. At the Oscars she said to Malcolm from the stage, "You make me feel
like dancing." Quoting the Leo Sayer. Her next role would be in Woody Allen's A Midsummer
Night's Sex Comedy followed by Romantic Comedy, costarring Dudley Moore. Soon after they bought their first house in
Ojai, Ca which Malcolm still considers his home town. In 1987 she also tried her hand at executive producing and
acting in the End of the Line. The movie must have appealed to her
because it was about the railroad which held deep roots in her family, though
the film was not highly praised. Lindsay Anderson also put her in one of his last
films, The Whales of August. Soon after her father died in 1989.
Ironically, though they often
talked about it, the couple would never do another major film together. The
closest they came was an episode together for Shelly Duvall's Faerie Tale
Theater. The show consisted of famous people acting out fairy tales. Mary played
a not-so little Red Riding hood to Malcolm's big bad wolf. While she had the
lead role in Cross Creek as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the first time she had to
carry a movie on her own, Malcolm only appeared in
one small scene. The two would never again appear on film together even though
in 1982 Mary was still saying, "Malcolm and I would love nothing more than
to work together again and we will". Their last
work together was in the failed play Holiday directed by Malcolm's mentor
Lindsay Anderson in the UK in 1987.
When Malcolm and Mary met she said, "For a long time, when
Malcolm and I would meet people, they would shake his hand and look into his
eyes and keep looking at him while they shook my hand because he was a movie
star, and they'd never heard of me. It made me mad, not because I needed their
attention, but they were meeting another human being, movie star or not, and
their priorities were screwed up." Around this time Malcolm's career was
going down and hers was going up. Though neither have said it, this probably put
a strain on their relationship. By 1988 they were separated and by
1990 they were divorced. Since they have two children together, neither have bad
mouthed each other and they still maintain a decent relationship for the kids.
There was never a reason given to the public because of the spilt.
Other projects include the TV mini series Tender Is the
Night, One Magic Christmas, and in Dead of Winter she played multiple roles.
In 1990 she worked in her biggest budget film and one of her most famous roles
as Clara in
Back to the Future Part III. Like Malcolm in Get Crazy, she also took a role that required her to sing
in The Butchers Wife during 1991. After that she stopped acting so she could
campaign for Bill Clinton's presidential run in 1992. She has continued to act
throughout the 90's in big films like What's Eating Gilbert Grape,
Philadelphia, Powder and Nixon. In 1995 she remarried to
environmentalist nut Ted Danson, who said in 1988 that the oceans were going to
freeze. The two met when he auditioned for Cross Creek back in
1983. In 1996 they began working together on TV on the
movie Gulliver's Travels and the series Ink, which started the
same time as Malcolm's series Pearl and both only lasted one
season. At the time it was one of the most expensive failures in TV history. In 2000 she started taking less mainstream, usually as the middle-aged
mother, roles like Picnic, Wish You Were Dead, Life as a House. Though
she will never be a highly recognized Hollywood actress like Nicole Kidman, she
continues to work steadily and win critical praise.
Besides an Academy Award. She has also received Honorary Doctorates from the University
of Arkansas in Little Rock and Hendrix College in Arkansas.

Mary Steenburgen can be quite contrary. Really, she can
In new locally shot movie, actress known for her vulnerability plays wicked
By Chris Garcia | American-Statesman Film Writer 5/13/06

We tend to think of actress Mary Steenburgen as
pink-cheeked and wholesome, her winsome girl-next-door smile and blushing
Southern manner completing an aura of scandalous adorableness. We consider her
in Jonathan Demme's "Melvin and Howard," Woody Allen's "A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" or Ron Howard's "Parenthood" and
see a fragile porcelain bird - twittery, high-pitched, fine-boned, breakable.
"We" can mean you or me. Or this fellow, who spots
Steenburgen on the treadmill at the gym in a Tony Austin hotel. He opens his
mouth and says, "You're the one who plays straight women, right?"
Steenburgen, in town recently shooting the feature
"Elvis and Anabelle," has no idea how to answer this. Instead, her
mind leaps to the fact that she and Alicia Silverstone played lesbians last
winter in the David Mamet play "Boston Marriage."
"Straight" - what could this mean?
"It means he probably saw 'Ragtime' or 'Cross Creek,'
but he didn't see 'Miss Firecracker' or 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape,' "
says Steenburgen, sitting in the cafe of said hotel. She wears a forest-green
denim Izod jacket (the little alligator still looks hungry) over a floral spring
dress. She places a black Prada backsack on the floor. (Too bad she declines to
be photographed - her "hair and makeup" guru isn't on hand - because
she is heart-stopping.)
People watch some of her 50-plus films and think they know
the Steenburgen style, she grouses, softly. But there isn't a Steenburgen style.
"I think that's why I only see my movies once," she says in that
girlish, sometimes cracking, sometimes laughing voice. "I don't want to
know my screen persona. There's no constant thread."
Still, flipping through Steenburgen's performances summons
reductive, pre-cooked ideas about what kind of actress she is. Let's
free-associate adjectivally: sweet, offbeat, ditzy, jumpy, vulnerable. She is
one of those yeoman actors everybody recognizes - oh, her - because she's worked
for seemingly ever. At a beaming 53, she is all over, a classic.
"Hopefully what I've avoided is being put in a
box," says Steenburgen, who lives in Southern California with husband Ted
Danson and their children from previous marriages. (Steenburgen was married to
Malcolm McDowell for 10 years.) "Some people think I have (been put in a
box), but I haven't. One would only think that by looking at one or two of my
films."
She suggests we revisit roles in which she plays
self-absorbed and condescending ("Miss Firecracker") or wantonly
adulterous ("Gilbert Grape"). Or, better, that we see her as Marienne
Hotchkiss in the uplifting dramedy "Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing
& Charm School," which co-stars Robert Carlyle, Marisa Tomei, Danny
DeVito and native Austinite Rachel Winfree. (It ran for only one week in Austin
in April.)
She plays the head of the titular school, a "bizarre
character" into which the actress sunk her (spotless, perfectly aligned)
teeth. In the "very odd, very sweet" movie, Steenburgen dances with
Donnie Wahlberg. This required her to take a dancing crash-course, even if she
did win the cha-cha championship at charm school in her native Arkansas when she
was 13.
Then she points to her role as a destructively domineering
pageant mother in "Elvis and Anabelle," the Burnt Orange Production
filming in Austin. Co-starring Max Minghella and Blake Lively in the young title
roles and Joe Mantegna as a hunchback mortician, the fairy tale romance by
writer-director Will Geiger allows Steenburgen to untie her inner "wicked
queen," she says.
Steenburgen feeds on the craft, not the fame. She is the odd
celebrity harboring "actual physical fears" of crowds and a
constitutional dread of the spotlight. When she won the best supporting actress
Oscar for "Melvin and Howard" in 1981, she fled Hollywood and didn't
work for more than two years.
She thrives on the chameleonic demands of acting, the
constant transformations that mean there are no constants. She is not "the
one who plays straight women." She's the one who plays straight women,
crooked women, hurt women, feisty, lustful women. She contains multitudes, each
one a slice of herself ready to be coaxed into the open.
"Each character I play is certainly me, a part of me. So
in the course of playing them, I have to look at all kinds of scary truths about
me, some of which I probably never, ever would have looked at. I have a visual
for it. You know those Chinese cabinets with lots of little drawers? That's me.
There are thousands of drawers, and every time I go to play somebody, I open a
combination of drawers. I take out what's inside and say, 'That's me.' "

October 4, 2001
Ann O'Neill: City of Angles Hail to the Ex-Chief
Bill Clinton picked up an award Tuesday night from American Oceans Campaign.
Guests at the Century Plaza hotel gawked as stars plied the red carpet. Later, Charles McDowell, 18-year-old son of Malcolm McDowell, introduced the
former president. Clinton is a friend of the family, McDowell said, and it was a
longstanding tradition for him to hide Easter eggs for the McDowell kids.
"You can tell a lot about an adult by how they hide Easter eggs,"
McDowell said. Clinton did it "just right." He ended by saying that
Bush may be president, but "it's Bill Clinton who's my hero."
The remarks moved Clinton and others to tears. "I may live several more
years, but I don't think I'll ever be more proud of an introduction," he
said, wiping his eyes.

In Family Guy - Fast Times at Buddy Cianci High - Ted Danson and
Mary Steenburgeon are walking down the street. Peter comes up to them and Ted's
forehead is massive. Suddenly it starts to rain and Ted shelters Mary from the
rain under his head. He then asks if they can have sex now. She says no and he
replies he hates being a freak.

Mary

She often shares part of the holidays with Malcolm, her former
spouse's family, just as her character does with Jon Voight. "I see my
ex-husband, his wife and little boys. It's a real part of some people's lives,
and this is a humorous way to deal with it." 11/08

"I think the reason this part was easy for me was we have
four kids," all adults, two by her marriage to Malcolm McDowell and two
stepchildren from her current marriage to Ted Danson "and I crave their
attention. I had dinner with all four of them last night and I didn't want to
leave. There's a part of me that actually doesn't mind doing my son's laundry. I
mind doing mine or my husband's, but somehow not my children's. It's so sick.
But I understand it (failure to launch) in a way. It's a little bit of a dream
situation for me, believe it or not." 7/20/08

"Malcolm went through
an experience similar to mine, at the same age, with a successful film (if....),
and that's probably one of the reasons we understand each other, because he had
to learn what success means and what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that
you're not answerable to other people, and it doesn't mean you can suddenly
start acting like a big shot. You have to learn that stuff. Going off the deep
end is kind of easy."

"Growing up, I had dreams of what
somebody would have to be, for me to fall madly in love. As I got older,
everybody kept telling me it doesn't exist. I couldn't accept that. I didn't like
to date; I didn't like to have love affairs. I always felt uncomfortable and
untruthful. And then I met Malcolm, and that was the dream. Compatible is a terrible, boring word, but if anyone's compatible, it's
that man. We spend ridiculously long amounts of time together without ever
feeling tired of each other's company. What I like best about him is that he
just dives into each day. He never takes things for granted, including his
success and whatever money and good things have come his way. I refuse to read
any more statistics about how difficult it is to make a marriage work. We both
turn down jobs so we can be together."

"I tell you nobody can harm a hair on her head. It is amazing how passionate you feel
about children. I just loved her so from the moment I watched her come out of my
body. Malcolm was right there beside me, helping me do it. He kept staring in my
face and making the pain go away. It was a very beautiful, experience, not in
any sort of bullshit way...just simple and lovely. That was the most powerful
thing that ever happened to me."- Rolling Stone 1982

"God, she's a mess!" Pause. "Um,
not really." Pause. "I actually don't mind her mess at all. I mean I like
the place to look-as you can see-lived in. But I do have my little things, and I
like to hang my trousers up on a hanger and stuff like that. Mary would just
throw hers on the floor. It's probably a $300, a $3000 dress. I mean, I can't do
that, but it doesn't bug me that she does it.
"You know, Mary has amazing
strength, a great sense of humor. She's a good person. I don't know many people
as good as she is, or as nice. A lot has happened to her in two years, whatever
it is, and that's been a difficult time because she's had to adjust and realign
her whole life. But she's very levelheaded. She's from the South, and I think
that's helped her."
What about her faults?
A mischievous glint. "She can be a
bit holier-than-thou at times, but she doesn't have many. All the faults are on
my side." - Rolling Stone 1982